Driver (Device Driver)

The layer of software that lets an operating system or higher-level program read and write to a piece of hardware.

A driver sits between hardware and higher-level software, translating requests like “read a frame of video” or “turn the motor to this angle” into low-level instructions the hardware understands, and organizing whatever the hardware returns into a format a program can use. The term has two related senses: an operating-system-level device driver, such as a graphics driver or a USB-serial driver; and a “ROS driver” in robot software — a ROS node, written by the manufacturer or the community, that publishes data from a camera, lidar, or motor onto standard topics. When bringing new hardware into a system, checking whether a driver is already available is usually the first step.

ExampleAfter installing the realsense-ros driver package, launching it makes a RealSense camera’s color and depth images available on topics such as /camera/color/image_raw.

Also called

ROS Driver, Device Driver

Related

Firmware · Software Development Kit · Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) · ros2_control · Intel RealSense SDK 2.0 (librealsense) · Node (ROS)

Sources

Wikipedia: Device driver
IntelRealSense/realsense-ros (GitHub)